


Sleep On The Floor (Ripuels Ask Fic)

by suney



Category: Alien: Isolation (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Road Trips, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 04:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21488125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suney/pseuds/suney
Summary: For the lovely people who sent individual tumblr asks that ended uptaking on a life of their ownand becoming this road trip fic. Thank you so much for keeping me inspired!
Relationships: Amanda Ripley/Christopher Samuels
Comments: 18
Kudos: 35





	1. things you said when you thought i was asleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OutreOtter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OutreOtter/gifts), [Annabel7](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/gifts), [superat626](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superat626/gifts), [Anonymous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymous/gifts).

_Dedicated to [OutreOtter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OutreOtter/pseuds/OutreOtter)_

-

Amanda is standing at her workbench heaving on the end of a crowbar the first time it happens.

“Just give me a second! I’m nearly- there!” 

“What the hell are you going on about now?” A barrister pokes her nose into the workshop, observing the unfolding events from over her glasses. “I know you like your own company and tend to have these ‘stern’ discussions with yourself, but yelling at no one is actually pretty fucking weird, Amy.” 

“Don’t call me that.” Ripley fires at her with a dangerous glance, wiping away horrific spatters of tin scented fluid, it’s tang reminiscent of aluminum on fillings. “Also, I was yelling at _you_ for being an impatient ass on my comms.” 

“Mm, no, I wasn’t.” 

“Who else could it have been, Nina?” 

She hums, squinting down at the screen, an insistent banner flashing white and grey along the top.

_Eat… 18:30._

“My God you’re an idiot, Ripley. That’s not a message, it’s an alarm.”

“What? I don’t have any alarms, not for this time of day.” Amanda brushes the device off the table and into her bag on the floor. “And name calling, really?”

“I was joking.” She holds her shoulder, crossing her ankles to lean fully on the other woman. “But since you’re already distracted, come and sit down. I bought lunch.” She gently touches the cold wrist of a synthetic, laying motionless on the table. “If that’s alright by you, Samuels? Because I swear, even you won’t be able to make me give her mouth to mouth if she faints again.”

“He won’t be able to make you do anything until he’s fixed, Taylor.” The engineer rolls her eyes and follows the heavenly smell of curry wafting from the crib room.

“You really think you can?”

“I have to…”

The next time it happens she had fallen asleep using a bicep of the deactivated- the temporarily dead- android as a pillow. Her chair up as high as it will go and his hand in her own.

_Sleep… 23:59._

“W’the fuck is going on?” Amanda mumbles into the synthetic’s side, lazing her arms over his chest to look at the screen. She wonders if she had installed a dodgy app, or if there had been a bug in the last batch of updates. 

She yawns, swipes at the alert, and decides it probably had the right idea anyway. 

_Goodnight._

“Goodnight… I guess.”

Over time, the alarms had become progressively more specific. Mentioning conversations she’d had in private, even alone. Offering her advice, greeting her, wishing she had a fabulous day or night. Shockingly even to her, she never thought it was creepy, going back through her downloads to determine they had in fact been from the phone, to the phone. It was sweet. Familiar in the way it was worded like an old friend. 

“Hey.” Taylor, as had become routine, appears at her door for visit one out of three today. “I bought coffee.”

“Oh my God, you read my mind.” 

“I do, everyday, at exactly seven in the morning.”

“Yeah and what time do you call this?” Amanda gratefully trades the cup for a pair of soggy tin-snips and takes a drink, her fluid covered hands sticking to the paper as they swap back. Her friend holding it by the lid at an arms length.

“Late. Late is what I make of it. I’ve been at work since five absolutely snowed in with paperwork. So, fend for yourself for lunch? And don’t stay up all night, I know you’re excited, but get some rest and do it properly. Please. You only get-”

“One shot.” Amanda nods, pulling at a creamy tube full of metallics. “I know.” 

Her phone blares once, and then again. 

“Are you still getting those?” Nina asks indifferently, unable to counteract the hand over her upper stomach attempting to hold her bagel down as out of the chest comes what looks like an organ, attached at the base by colour coded wires.

"Yah."

“Aren’t you going to check it?”

It rings one more time in a different tone and Amanda supposes she should. The advice it offered had sometimes been handy, telling her the microwave had gone off, or the ice had melted in her bourbon and coke. This, however, was eerie.

_Pay attention. _

_Please don’t cut the red wire._

_Do not cut the red wire._

It vibrates a final time. 

_S-Exec Repair Manual, p 138: preventative measures for fuel cell ignition._

“Holy fuck.” Amanda flips a page on the next table over, quoting from it. “‘Disconnect from power source before removing fuel cell… red wire last… prone to violent combustion…’ _Holy fuck_." 

“Someone’s definitely watching over you.” Nina breathes a sigh of relief. 

“I might- yeah, I might sit down for my coffee today.” 

“Good idea. I’ll leave you to it.” 

Amanda nods her goodbye with a quick hug and regards the synthetic at a safe distance. It isn’t until hours later that she moves, or even speaks again, shocked into silence by the fact she could have killed her friend and less importantly, lost an arm in doing so. 

_Your drink is definitely cold. It has been for six hours._

She glances at the screen as it wobbles on her jogging knee. “So, I’ve been thinking,” she starts out of nowhere, “if I didn’t know any better, which I do, I’d agree with Nina and say you’re looking out for me. Which is ridiculous because all the evidence points to you just being a device, but I think somebody is behind this. Whatever this is." 

_I am here. _

“Yeah, I _feel_ that. Maybe I’m going insane, because that’s kinda likely… but I think you want something from me too.” 

_What might that be?_

“I don’t know. I don’t even know who you are, let alone what you could possibly be after.”

_It would be nice if you stayed intact._

Amanda huffs her way over to disconnect the trickle charger from the terminals in Samuels’ chest. “A real Samaritan.”

_I am being honest. I want you safe. I… _

“You what?" 

_Nothing._

“Okay buddy, maybe it’s best to pump the breaks before you freak me out. Don’t get me wrong, you’re cool, whoever you are, and if you ever show yourself we can go for a beer or something. But I’m kind of… committed elsewhere.” 

_Committed?_

“Yeah.”

_Oh._

“Problem?”

_Not at all. I'm… happy. For you._ **Pause.** _Anyone I might know of?_

“Probably not, we haven’t been on-site very long.”

_Nina?_ A familiar sass bleeds through this notification that Amanda can almost hear. 

“What? Fuck no. I care about her too, but it’s definitely someone else.” She wipes hydraulic fluid from her hands on an old rag. An old rag that happened to be a shred of Samuels’ favourite semi-melted shirt. He looks disgusted by her actions even in his sleep. “Do- do you really think I’d be investing so much time and effort into fixing this synthetic if I didn’t- care about him? A lot?” 

_Yes, you would. Because you are kind._

Amanda fights to urge to inform the stranger that she’d had to kill people before. Murder at point blank range. Leave some to die. Use human life as distraction. Instead, she turns up the radio.

“Blue Öyster Cult. Burning for you. What a solid song.” She looks over the slightly charred synthetic before her. “I’m not being at all ironic.” 

_Home in the valley, home in the city;_

_Home isn’t pretty, ain’t no home for me;_

“You know it?”

_Obviously. _The text is no different than usual but rings like a pompous English accent. _It is a classic, I rather like it. And Bat Out Of Hell._

“Oh, my friend. You are after my heart.” 

_I hope so…_

“Keep hoping.” She laughs to the ceiling, tapping a hex key to the palm of her hand. “When I finally get this guy up we’re going to Earth and we’re just- just fucking hitting the road. Getting outta Dodge, or y’know. Luna. We can sleep in shitty motels and in the back of the car and I can pick up work in garages as we go. And I know I’m going to absolutely torture him with this kinda music, he’ll hate it, but I’ll find ways to make it up to him.”

_I do not think he’d hate that at all. I think he’d love it, actually. _

“I don’t think he loves anything. I don’t know if he can. But here’s hoping he’ll be fond enough of me to stick around after he’s back in one piece, and out of The Company’s grubby little hands.” She realizes the irony of her words, hesitating to brush his hair back with grease stained nails. “If he doesn’t it’ll be enough knowing he’s out there somewhere. Alive, even though I miss him. Fuck, I miss him.”

The device falls silent as she presses her lips to his forehead. 

“Goodnight, Samuels. Keep ‘em crossed for tomorrow. It’s the big day.”

Her comms device vibrates in her pocket as she flops down onto the cribroom couch. Her eyelids droop, brain shutting down for the day. She decides she might just check it in the morning. 

_(Goodnight, Amy. I miss you too.)_


	2. things you said under the stars and in the grass

_Dedicated to Anonymous_

-

“Jesus fucking Christ! Do you have stealth mode on or something?”

Christopher stands like a monolith, gawping at a woman nestled into long grass and clutching her chest. 

“You don’t sneak up to lone women in a field at bloody midnight, Samuels!”

“I knew it was you.” His vacant expression goes unmoved. “There is no one else around, possibly for miles.”

“Still,” she grumbles, “after everything, you’re lucky you didn’t get a maintenance jack to your kneecaps.”

“I do not have… Did you bring that with us?” 

“It’s in the car, but my point stands!”

“You are going to be miserable company later, aren’t you?” Christopher teases fondly. 

“Wow. Love you too.” She wriggles down again, scratching at the prickles in the back of her neck and inside of her wrists. “Who would have known I’m allergic to grass? I’d never seen the real stuff before.”

“You should have brought your sleeping bag to lay on.” 

“Should’a, could’a. But I didn’t. It’s so worth it though, just look at those stars.” 

Christopher looks up. No doubt, it is beautiful, and perhaps the clearest sky he had beheld since Savastopol, but decidedly there are far better things to view even in this light.

There’s a tug at the cuff of his jeans. “Come, find a patch to lay in.” 

He sits down and flattens out the grass between them, looking through the gap to the woman precisely a metre away. He’d measured. “What are you doing out here?”

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“You’ll laugh.” 

“I will not.” Christopher could guarantee it, counting the number of times he had laughed beyond his control on less than one hand. “Tell me?”

Amanda tilts her head, gaze leaving his for the sky. “I’ve never seen a shooting star before. The moon doesn’t have the atmospheric density to break up space debris, they all just land. No fire, no blazing trail over the sky. Just a fuckin’ hole in the ground.” 

“Why would that be laughable?” 

“Because it is.” Amanda watches him split a blade of grass down the middle, casting either half to the side. “Because I’ve been alive for twenty-seven years and have never set foot on Earth before now. We came from here, at least I did anyway, like as a race. Then we left for the stars and some of us never looked back, but-” she looks around at the tall trees and long grass littered with wildflowers. “But I could never stop.” 

Christopher nods gently. He’d been created on Earth which made him Terran by (extraordinarily) loose definition, and though he’d never fit in anywhere naturally, or hold a citizenship, he can’t help but feel like he belongs wherever this human is too. 

Amanda takes a sharp breath and wallops his arm in excitement. A white tailed rock spearing across the sky before vanishing to particles. “Holy fuck, did you see that?!” 

“I did.” Samuels wastes no time to watch his friend’s amazement and awe, somehow gratefully she’d kept a hint of wonder after their tribulations. Or maybe just starting to get it back since being on the road. “What did you think?” 

“It was… pretty underwhelming.” She sighs. “But I loved every millisecond of it. What about you?”

“I think the sky should have done much better, given it was your first.” He looks her over. “What did you wish for?” 

“Didn’t make one, and even if I did you know it doesn’t come true if you tell somebody, right?”

“I barely think I count as someone, and you’re lying.” Christopher is nudged from afar for many reasons. Mostly because he’d been told to not use his sensory equipment at such a sensitive, almost invasive setting. In reality, he just _knows_ her. “How is the universe supposed to know what you want if you do not ask for it?” 

“Chris?“ 

“Mm.” 

“That was kind of beautiful.” Amanda peers over her shoulder, offering her hand for him to take. He does, interlocking their fingers over the astronomical gap between them. Both situational and physiological. “If you have to know, I wished for a sign. Something to tell me I’m in the right place, or at least going the right way to- to get to something that means the world to me.”

“I’m equipped with a GPS.” Christopher says flatly, not because it’s void of sentiment, but because he can’t allow himself to think she wouldn’t pick up the underlying hope had it been voiced. “It’s surprisingly accurate, in fact.”

She barks with laughter and shakes his hand playfully. “Not fucking literally. I know where we are and how to get to the next stop, I mean something else entirely. The next chapter of my life that I think- I know, I’m ready for.”

“Oh.”

“But hey, I’ll keep you around just in case we do get lost. So you’ll always be there too.”

The synthetic doesn’t give any hint that he had even heard the women or appreciated her joke as they’re consumed in the chirping of crickets. The wind through new leaves. A nearby rustling of God knows what. The breathing beside him hitches and he soothes her with a rub of his thumb, drawing a lazy circle into her palm. 

“Okay, so I told you mine.” Amanda says, trying to reclaim the easy atmosphere. “Your turn.” 

“Not a chance.” 

“Bullshit. Why?” 

“Well, at least one of our wishes needs to come true.”

The woman shrugs and pulls his hand to her chest to play with, stopping herself from scratching at grass cut skin. “Suit yourself I guess, hypocrite.”

Samuels genuinely laughs, oblivious to the fact that had he said _“you, I wished for you”_, the universe, and Amanda Ripley, may have allowed it.


	3. things you said when you were drunk

_Dedicated to [Annabel7](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7)_

-

Both Amanda and Christopher inspect the drink sliding her way. It’s whiskey, _good whiskey_. So good neither really know if they could appreciate it. Likely not Samuels with his lack of taste; and absolutely not Ripley, for a very similar reason. 

“What’s this?” 

“Across the bar. Black hair.” The bartender says politely, enjoying this perhaps a little too much. “You have an admirer.”

Amanda follows his direction to the opposite end where a stranger sits. A tamed but bushy face, a leather jacket, leaning easily over a motorcycle helmet. “Oh.”

She lifts up the glass with a grateful nod, squints, and disrespectfully shots it. The corner of the man’s lips quirk. 

“He can see you have company. Am I suddenly invisible?” Samuels is convinced he may have just left reality altogether as his friend seems to ignore (or hopefully just doesn’t hear) him. 

Amanda leans on the bar, mouthing something across the way Chris can’t quite see the entirety of, but catches a _“-what can I do for you?”_

The stranger writes something down on a napkin to deliver with the next drink, and the bartender who looks chuffed to finally be selling the higher end stuff, grins as he places it down, definitely having snooped the message on the way over. 

_Just drink it looking pretty. X_

Amanda, even to Christopher’s standard, does just that. She sips gently, a little more appreciative of the vintage this time around. Eventually, she turns to him, brushing her fingers through her hair and pushing it back over her shoulders. 

“You- look-” Samuels wonders why he had opened his mouth in the first place, trying to find something to deliver in the place of ‘nice’, 'aesthetically pleasing’, 'beautiful’, even 'hot’? “You look very proud of yourself.” 

“I am.” Amanda takes another sip. “Not everyday you have a man who looks like that taking an interest in you.”

Christopher supposes not. “I can give you some privacy, if you need.”

“Privacy? What for? We’ve been sleeping in the boot of a car for two and a half months, we’re way past that. Besides, it turns out you were the one hacking my phone and camera while repairs were being carried out so God knows what you saw me doing, and I was the one who didn’t actually mind.” Amanda raises an eyebrow. “I can’t believe I’ve never asked you how the hell you did that?” 

“I uploaded myself into the Torrens, when the reactor purged it reset security for seven minutes. Everything came back online, even comms. Even me. I essentially piggybacked over on your connection with Verlaine, and from there it was a lot easier to get around from device to device. An old… friend, of mine in security told me how to do it. For the record I only hacked you when you were by my body. Otherwise, I was completely offline.” 

“You, piggybacking.” Amanda chuckles, clinging to it of all things. “That would be a sight, I don’t think there’s a human on Earth who could lift ya.” 

“Maybe your friend back there could, being so great and all.”

Amanda leans away with a double take, eyeing him over. “What’s gotten into you? You okay?” 

“Yes.” Christopher feeds his hands into his pockets with a shrug. “I- I- don’t know. Sorry, that was quite unnecessary.” 

“It’s fine.” She mumbles, turning back to the bar.

“No, it’s not. Actually, I may start heading back to the wagon if you don’t mind.” Christopher barely gets a sideways glance as he hops down off his stool. “I won’t wait up.” 

She catches him by the shoulder. “Are you sure?”

Christopher’s expression and only somewhat figurative heart falls. 

“You’re okay- I mean, are you sure you’re okay?”

“Of course.” He feigns a smile. “Enjoy yourselves.” 

Samuels pretends to not see her visit the other side of the room as he takes a last glance back through the door. 

The walk is slower than he’s used to. The streets are quieter than the bar, fairly understandable for a Monday. Every night is Saturday night to the unemployed uncommitted Amanda and himself. _Amanda and himself_. That was wrong, there is no ‘and’, certainly no ‘we’, they are separate. By age, by mind, and by species? If he were to be generous in calling what he is a species rather than a device. A gadget or contraption. Not even an individual custom model at that, with their unique bodies and faces, but just another cog in the Company Machine.

“Chris!” He turns on the spot as a voice calls out, footsteps clomping towards him at a run. “Wait!” 

“Ripley- what-?”

“Ugh,” having caught him, she holds her stomach and leans back against the brick wall, “I don’t feel so good.”

“I’m not surprised. Do you need to find a bathroom?” 

“No, no, just- _ugh_, running after drinking straight whiskey on an empty stomach. Not good.”

Samuels waits, half watching to see if their new acquaintance is to come around the corner at any second. Thinking rather peculiarly if they intended to use their car for a rendezvous he may be inclined to light it on fire come morning. 

“Earth to Chris. Literally,” Ripley clicks her fingers in front of her face with a smile, “what are you doing?”

“Is your friend not coming?” 

Amanda scoffs. “What? No. He’s so far out of my league it’s tragic, besides, he was just a rich flirt with a thing for brunettes. I knew it straight away.” 

“Oh, I thought-”

“You thought he was trying to pick me up?” 

“You went over to see him.”

“To say thanks. And bye!” Amanda laughs nauseously, colour running from her face, she closes her eyes and rests her head back. “No one is stupid enough to look at me and think 'oh yeah, totally wouldn’t mind that headfuck knowing where I live, might take her home with me’, Chris.”

Samuels frowns and taps her side with his elbow. “I do, every day. Not the head-F’d part.” He pauses but doesn’t give her room to interrupt. “And for what it’s worth, you won’t ever sway me into believing you’re not considered an absolute catch. To other people.” 

“Oh, the man flatters too. Keep that up and you really might be taking me home after all.” She covers her eyes with a disgruntled scoff. “Sorry, that was- God, I’m really fucking drunk." 

“I know. It’s alright.” _It really is_. “You know I could- if you wanted to?”

Amanda peeks through her fingers, eyeing over a cautious looking synthetic. Wondering if the cheeky shine in his gaze is coming from the street lamp. 

“W- what? You can’t be serious?”

“Totally serious.” Christopher gestures to his back. “You’re too unwell to walk yourself, so I’ll take you home. Hop on.” 

Amanda breathes a sigh of relief, thick with something else more like disappointment…? “You had me going for a hot minute there.” 

“You should know me better than that by now.” In his voice is a smile as she’s lifted off a nearby trashcan onto his back. Arms feed around his neck and he presses his chin into them. "I would never be so crude.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Amanda pokes her head over his shoulder to kiss his cheek. “But, y'know Samuels, for what it’s worth, if anybody in the world was actually going to take me home, I would want it t’be you anyway.” 

'Blood’ rushes to Christopher’s cheeks, paling him immensely. Had he known that, he wouldn’t have offered just a damn piggyback.


	4. things you said with no space between us

_Dedicated to [Annabel7](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7)_

-

“I told you we should have gotten a room.” Christopher says disapprovingly. 

“And I told you we couldn’t afford it, unless I want food for the next week. Which is already as cheap as it can be considering all I have is ramen and protein bars.” 

“Ripley,” he rolls onto his side, the back of the car rocking to and fro, “that is not good for you.”

“There’s nutrition in granola. C'mon, it could be worse. It _has_ been worse.” Amanda’s teeth chatter together as her insistent fiddling with a rip in the roof cover tears it ever so slightly bigger, earning a devastated scowl from the left. “Oops.” 

“You’re going to freeze to death.” He digs some tape out of the center console and sticks it back up. “You are going to get hyperthermia and I’m going to have to take you to hospital where I won’t be able to visit you, being unregistered, and all I will be able to do is just wait, hoping nobody steals me while you’re in there.”

“Christopher. You’re rambling.” She shakes him. “Also, it’s _fine_. I’m better than I felt last week.” 

“It’s not fine. You have been sick three times since we’ve been down here, and I cannot, and will not see you like that again.” Samuels’ hand reaches out in the dark, knuckles press to her forehead. 

“Oh my God, you’re so warm.” Her neck cranes up to follow his hand as it withdraws. “Wait. Why? Are you okay?” 

“Mm, of course. I have increased my radiator output to try prevent your pneumonia from returning.”

Ripley accepts his answer and rolls in a little closer, pulling the folds of her sleeping bag up around her cheeks.

“We don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to.” Samuels disregards her worried protest as he peels himself out of his own sleeping bag to lay it over them both. The human nestling up under his arm an acceptable trade. “We can go back to Tranquility, or rather, find somewhere with walls and power at least.” 

“You’re not having fun?”

“No, I am.” Christopher shakes his head quickly, a mop of hair falling over his eyes. He’d ask her to cut it tomorrow. Always doing it too ‘factory fresh’ himself, according to the only human being who mattered- whenever the hell that frankly dangerous thought rebelled against his protocols, he’ll never know. “I’ve been having an amazing time with you.” 

It had been incredible. The first month they lived abundantly, Amanda on not fine but proper food, and himself on top-shelf hydraulic fluid. His friend insisting the bad stuff would do the equivalent of giving him tremendously high cholesterol, and still does to this day. Sacrificing her own comforts for it in fact. But as the months progressed, they’d popped tyres and changed filters and pumps, in himself and the old wagon, and finally after a bout of stitches from a squirrel invasion, they accepted the reality of needing to set up base for a while. 

This spot was as good as any, if not the best. Waves crashing barely ten metres from their doorstep, a town glimmers with neon signs so far across the bay they could be fairy lights, a campfire smouldering outside their window… He’d even heard a bird sing a few mornings in a row.

“I love this.” He breathes, dragging her in closer and appreciating the soft hum of his friend for what it is. Soaking in warmth. 

“Good.” Amanda’s lips graze over the skin of his neck as she speaks. “I was worried. It hasn’t been easy.”

“Are you having a good time too?” 

“The best, Christopher.“ 

She pulls away slightly to look at him, stare into his soul like she had so many times before in the past weeks. Brushing the hair from his face and stroking his jaw. For a panicked second, Samuels thinks he might just kiss her, risk everything between them, even spontaneous deactivation. Taking the slightest of leans forward, he can’t tell if she recoils or shivers in the cold. 

Samuels pulls himself from the odd stupor clouding his judgement. “This won’t do. Your fingers are like ice. May I?”

She shrugs and he reaches to unzip her sleeping bag, stuffing his long limbs in through her squarks and various dramatic profanities. Zipping it up along the middle and nestling down.

“Is this what it’s like to be a sardine…?” Amanda laughs up at the disgruntled, slightly worse for wear synthetic in her bedding. Head on her pillow. Noses nearly pressed together. “Yeah. Yeah, I think this is exactly what it’s like to be a sardine.”

“We could possibly fit better if you would turn around, Ripley.”

“Maybe,” she wriggles her arms out of the tight covers to hold his face again, “but then who’s going to do this? Because it’s obviously not going to be you.” 

It takes a worrying few seconds for Christopher to respond to the kiss, _the actual kiss_, the impossibly smooth lips pressed to his own, trying to coax some form of response. He closes his eyes, believing for the briefest of moments that the heartbeat pounding between them is actually in him, and finally, pushes back. Prompting a grateful moan from Amanda, a hand snaking its way around her waist with the squeak of a tight seam. She feeds a leg between his. Any space between them still doesn’t exist, but their arms and legs find gaps and curves to fill, lips fitting perfectly over and over again. 

“Amanda,” Samuels whispers, not denying her soft teasing pecks, “what, are you doing?”

“What I’ve wanted to do since the moment you woke up.” 

“This morning?”

Amanda chuckles. “No, you dork. Since you _woke up_, woke up. After Savastopol.”

He pulls back and Amanda protests by planting kisses into his chin and neck, to the collarbone revealed by a stretched shirt and across a melted ashy shoulder. 

“Do you mean to tell me we could have been doing this for the past three months?" 

“Well yeah.” She feels his radiator output skyrocket. “This and more.” 

“Oh my God.”


	5. things you said at the kitchen table

_Dedicated to [Superat626](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superat626)_

-

They’d been home for a week and a half. _Home_. A word neither Samuels nor Ripley ever imagined they’d say. Definitely not together. 

Not when they’d shared her bunk on the Torrens, or when he’d found her bleeding out in a corner of Savastopol, bruises on her neck and the charred evidence of a pipebomb nearby. Or when he’d blinked awake, retinas calibrating to see the brightest green eyes on Luna. In the whole universe. 

Amanda never called anywhere ‘home’ with meaning. It was a base of operations. Those operations being to drink copious amounts of alcohol, keep documentation regarding her mother, and occasionally pass out from exhaustion. Home was an idea, one she never had any sense of since childhood, and even then the form it took for a ten year old would be miles different to her now, almost twenty years later.

Samuels on the other hand, had. Throwing the term around without care. His office was an improvement from the cubicle he’d started in. A few plants- a philodendron selloum and a monstera deliciosa which he still couldn’t figure out the difference between, a Van Gogh knock off on the wall, and a cushy chair for his workplace acquaintances. They’d pop by occasionally, tell him about their weekends and travels and love lives. He was a good listener. Likable. Perhaps one of the reasons he’d been given an upgrade in the first place. A reason he had called it ‘home’.

But nothing, decidedly nothing, could compare to this.

He watches from the kitchen as Amanda hums to herself at the table, her foot tapping the chair adjacent, flicking through a magazine on the latest technological scoop. She’s rocking from side to side with her ear buds in and humming something new to the music dock, but something old in general. 

Christopher sits at her side with a steaming mug in each hand and the human leans over onto his shoulder. Her eyes don’t leave the pages, the humming doesn’t quieten. It’s a comfortable, easy meeting of their bodies, filling a gap just like they had done since that one very cold night what felt like more than two years ago.

“All This And Heaven Too.” She tells him before he even has to ask. “Here.” 

Samuels takes the ear bud from her and places it to his audio receptor. 

_And all my stumbling phrases,_

_Never amounted to anything worth this feeling;_

_All this heaven never could describe,_

_Such a feeling as I’m healing…_

“This is not your usual sort of music.” Christopher says as she squints and switches ears, one stronger than the other after the aforementioned pipe bomb incident. He leans in. “I like it.” 

She smiles to herself and shoves her glasses up her nose, pulling the magazine over the table to between them. “It’s Florence and The Machine.” 

“Have I ever told you that you are impossible to reason with?”

“Not nearly enough.”

Samuels watches his partner look to the next page as her face falls, an advertisement for job opportunities off planet. On neighbouring satellites and stations, close to where Ellen had been working. Where she had disappeared. “How are you feeling?”

“About?“ 

“Everything. Life, us, being done with our adventures for now. Settling down, here.” 

Ripley looks up, she gazes over the walls covered in pictures. Prints of bathers on the beach and their owners nowhere to be found. Of two beings in the forest, lost and sopping wet. A hooded figure charging at a motel outlet, asleep, head in his hand with a squirrel on his lap. Even the cupboards were decorated with souvenirs like a broken hookah, a vase of assorted feathers, postcards from Nina, and a trophy hubcap from their old wagon. 

“I feel,” she rests back, this time wriggling into an open arm, “like we’re home.” 

Christopher kisses the top of her head. “That we are, Amy. That we are.”


End file.
